Xbox and Oculus has now become the partners to make the virtual reality easily playable for gaming players. The future is about to be amazed by this kind of technology. Oculus VR has shown off the version of its virtual reality headset that will be sold to consumers, and revealed it will come with an Xbox One controller.
The Facebook-owned company also revealed it is working on its own handheld controller system called Oculus Touch. The Rift headset will be released early next year. Until now, only a “developer” version had been sold. It will compete with rival VR headsets such as Sony’s Morpheus and HTC’s Vive. The lines between Holo-Lens and a dedicated Xbox headset were blurred at GDC 2015 though, with Spencer saying “gaming and entertainment is going to be critical” to the Holo-Lens experience and revealing first party developers are already working on new gaming experiences. Microsoft is also involved with the consumer edition Oculus Rift, with the company confirming that Xbox One games will be stream-able on the VR headset.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said his firm had been looking at new ways for gamers to interact with virtual reality beyond using a console game-pad. He said they were designed to make sense of the kinds of gestures people made naturally with their hands. Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight, said the launch put Oculus in the “driver’s seat” in the VR market. “With Facebook’s resources it has a huge head-start over rivals and its already delivered two iterations of its developer platform.” He showed off the prototype Oculus Touch system, which consists of two wireless handheld controllers fitted with buttons, joy-pads and sensors.
Jason Rubin, head of Oculus Studios, introduced some early titles designed for the Rift, including Eve Valkyrie, a first-person shooting game, and role-playing game Chronos. Mr Wood said: “We consider virtual reality has the potential to be one of the most disruptive technologies for a decade.” Attracting developers to the Rift will be critical to Oculus’s success, said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner. “They’re all going to be competing hard for those developers to support their platforms – that’s where you’re going to see the real competition,” he said.
“Games developers are going to have a lot of difficult choices to make.”